Polls show that the great majority of New Zealanders don’t support a change in our country’s name.
John Tamihere is correct that the Maori language became an official language in1987. And correct in asserting that people are entitled to assert the name Aotearoa. But that certainly does not mean that the Government has any right to start changing the name of the country without formally seeking the agreement of the people by means of a referendum.
‘New Zealand’, or its Dutch equivalent, has been the name of our country since 1642. There was no word for New Zealand in the Maori language at that time, and indeed Maori had no concept of what we now call New Zealand as a nation until many years later.
When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, the words for New Zealand in the Maori version of the Treaty were ‘Nu Tirani’, and there is no record of any of the chiefs who signed it objecting to that name.
The first record of ‘Aotearoa’ being used to describe the whole country was in the second half of the 19th century, more than two centuries after Abel Tasman gave us the name New Zealand.
Polls show that the great majority of New Zealanders don’t support a change in our country’s name.
Don Brash
20 September, 2021